Tag: games

It’s been fairly obvious to most game developers for years that in-game communications are a relatively secure system for communications, simply because they have a sort of code built into them. And since terrorists and other bad actors have been known to use online games as a communications platform, it should not be surprising that the Deep State has too.

If Q is correct, one game being used for that purpose was Star Wars: Commander. Certainly some of the in-game exchanges there appear to be unrelated to the game nominally being played. So, it may be significant to note that it is being shut down as of June.

GAME CLOSURE ANNOUNCEMENT

We have come to the decision to shut down Star Wars™: Commander on June 12, 2020. As of March 13, 2020, all in-game purchases have been suspended. Star Wars: Commander will remain playable until 11am GMT on June 12, 2020.

I would expect that there is also a considerable amount of money-laundering taking place in the case of some of the more inexplicably successful online games.

Ascendant is a superhero RPG system that provides the mechanical basis for the upcoming Alt-Hero RPG. I backed its Kickstarter campaign, and if you’re into RPGs, you will probably want to do so as well.

Comic book RPGs tend to be sub-divided into “descriptor-based” and “effect-based” games. “Bolt of Fire” is a descriptor, while “Ranged Attack that deals 50 points of damage to one target” is an effect. A descriptor-based game prioritizes the descriptor over the effects. An effect-based game prioritizes the effects over the descriptor.

Ascendant strives to be neither a descriptor-based nor effect-based game. It is, rather, a physics-based game. The game mechanics are intended to be the physics engine of the game world. Powers have both descriptors and effects. Some effects are precluded by the logic of the descriptor, and some descriptors inevitably entail certain effects. The mechanics are elaborate and detailed (as in an effect-based game) but they are also broad and universalized (as in a descriptor-based game). Players are expected and encouraged to use their powers in whatever manner makes sense within the physics of a comic-book world, but not in ways that don’t make sense.

If a descriptor-based system aims to let players experience a comic-book story, and an effect-based system aims to let players play a superhero game, our physics-based system aims to let players simulate a comic book world. To do so, we have created logarithmic chart-based universal mechanics, a style of design that has not been widely used in the last two decades.

The designer is not only a personal friend, he is one of the best in the role-playing business. Which, of course, is why I asked him to design the Alt-Hero RPG.

Humanity may have reached Peak Gamma with this DOOM speedrunner’s response to being caught red-handed and accused of cheating.

You humour me greatly with your arrogance and contempt, a flood of accusations born from the poison of envy and smite of disrespect. I feel both disappointment and flattery these thoughts would originate from another player who has demonstrated one of a kind talent and has accomplished the impossible, yet is apparently immune from judgement owing to their reputation, do not think your words hold more credibility just because of who you are, being more well known and what you have accomplished in breaking world records and setting ones never previously accomplished, such as with TNT and Plutonia Nightmare. With that being said I will divulge my thoughts on the serious accusations you have set forth.

I won’t address the individual gameplay scenarios you’ve highlighted, as the foundation of your argument arises from jealously, this is clear when you contrast my success with your failure, being deluded into thinking you should have surpassed these trials yet cannot absolutely comprehend how someone else can claim victory on a consistent basis, instead I will address my playing ability. You know nothing about who I am or my history with this game, I am exceptionally talented not only at Doom, but other oldschool FPS along with videogames in general. I make speedruns and partake in Ironman out of passion for the game, it is a personal challenge in testing my playing ability to overcome arduous odds, I play for fun, it’s about me vs the game and I hold no strong competitive urge or desire to be known as the best, reputation and status are not important to me but having fun is essential.

Are you serious when you can’t believe someone can beat an Ironman consistently? It’s just playing the game without saving or loading, do you not have a fundamental understanding of the core gameplay and how to the play game correctly? Am I the only one who can play aggressively, with an intuitive and innate ability to bend the game to their will and not panic when in a dire situation, but with tactical genius aware of my surroundings and dexterous reflexes can act in the heat of battle and overcome arduous odds? When you highlight cases of RNG, I honestly don’t think about it that deeply, I’m confident in what I’m doing, I’ll make a risky move and hold strong with faith. I laugh at your baseless accusations of slowdown in reference to Stardate, I’m sure other skilled players such as Mrzzul and Nevanos could playthrough Stardate casually withour prior practice or saving and get just as far. Also bear in mind that I have died in several Ironmans before, do you honestly think their was demo manipulation there?

You also demonstrate your ignorance very clearly when you admit you haven’t watched my Ironman demos in full, and by watching I do mean actually studying them and assessing each scenario, bearing in mind my experience and ability at Doom which is extradonary, not skipping to a random moment and making up fabrications based on your own failures thinking oh it’s impossible, their is no way any player could accomplish that. I do make mistakes, sometimes crucial ones, this is also reflected if you studied my speedruns which are far from perfect and have flaws such as missing shots, awkward movement and poor dodging, however a key skill I have is not panicing when low on health or when the circumstance is dire. Well guess what, I’m one of a kind, no one can play the game like me, every talented player and speedrunner has their own strengths and weaknesses that make them stand out.

I am deluded when you suggest someone must have prior knowledge to stand a chance of victory at Ironman. Well look at Demon of the Well, he’s not a speedrunner but is known for making FDAs both blind and familiar, he has an exceptional ability at conquering maps on his first attempt, the most prominent example I can think of is rdwpa’s MuMe.wad. Does that mean he cheats? Certainly not, he’s a talented player who obviously has a high level of playing ability. You also have j4rio and 0xfooba who have accomplished amazing demos that haven’t been set before, with the former tysons that should be impossible and the latter UV-Maxes on some the hardest maps devised and speedrun movies of Sunlust. So why would you think my speedruns are cheated, when their are fellow speedrunners who have demonstrated extraordinary playing ability, do not stream and have surpassed my demos? As I certainly have never accussed anyone else of cheating, but respect their accomplishment and admire their tenacity at conquering very hard maps and goals.

I have not shown jealously or malice towards fellow speedrunners who have surpassed my demos but silently congratulate and admire their accomplishment, in some cases publicly such as when Ancalagon went back and re-ran Combat Shock in response to when I beat his old runs. I do not look at speedrunning with a competitive eye, thinking I must have the record and surpass my competitor, instead my view is a cooperative one, it’s us speedrunners against the game, building on one another’s ideas and talent when a new record is set, complementing each other’s unique strengths and weaknesses.

My question would be why are you accusing and targetting me specifically? I can see from the depths of your arrogance, you believe with absolute certainty you are correct and I must be a cheater with any form of rebuttal being null and void. Well let me state clearly I have nothing to gain, why would I cheat at Ironman when I have pubically stated previously I do not care about winning or if a fellow player surpasses me, this is just fun to me. For speedruns, what would be the purpose in cheating as it’s a personal challenge to me, I want to demonstrate to myself I’ve got the skill and talent to conquer very hard maps, it’s about me against the game and I don’t feel jealously at a fellow speedrunner who has beaten my record. I make speedruns out of passion and love for the game and not for admiration or self flattery, as long as Andy accepts the demo for DSDA that’s all I care about.

I am not going to stream as I do not care for an audience and am not influenced by the accusations of an envious stranger. I only streamed briefly for a short time in the past out of curiosity, but it does not interest me nor do I feel passion for it. I haven’t watched Twitch in over a year, I was drawn to it in my spare time during the short period prior to my first full time job after finishing my studies. My life has changed a lot in the past two years and their are far more important aspects in life which draw my attention, I have little free time as well. Also you must be very self-conscious if you honestly think one has to stream their demo to demonstrate they aren’t cheating, that just indicates your disrespect and distrust towards other players with exceptional playing ability, you’ll never be a talented survivalist like me ?

Let me make it clear I don’t give a damn what you or anyone else thinks of me, when I am passionate about a subject I will speak my mind truthfully even if it means being brash at times, both online and in real life, I won’t be intimidated by anyone and will confront them with assertion and confidence. I’m here for fun, making speedruns and commenting on subjects once in a while which capture my eye.

Thank you for revealing your true colors, seething with jealously and enveloped by arrogance, you’ve lost what respect I had for you. If you’ve come to your senses you will offer an apology, take a good luck in the mirror before you make such a disgusting accusation against a fellow Doom player, who has not caused strife and discord but shows humility and respect with a care free attitude, or will you continue this charade and repeat history, replicating the case of Okuplok? If you do continue to accuse, it will be solely for my amusement as I will not take you seriously and will likely ignore you. Choose wisely.

As a general rule, anyone whose response to criticism involves attacking the critic and his motivations is likely insecure about their position and attempting to defend what they know to be indefensible. I’m not talking about simply ignoring the critic or refusing to regard the criticism as relevant, I’m talking about posturing, asserting superiority, and attempting to discredit the critic.

No one is fooled by this sort of thing, which is why I find it strange that so many people are inclined to respond in such a suboptimal manner. It was also interesting to see how the YouTuber noticed the extraordinarily similar attitudes exhibited and even phrases utilized by the cheaters, which is a strong indication that the cheaters were Gamma males.

It’s really rather remarkable that the idiot SJWs who now run GenCon think that they can somehow make a violent criminal assault that took place in public disappear from the public awareness:

The story around the assault of The Quartering’s Jeremy Hambly appears to be getting worse. The promoters of the Gen Con are now silencing attendees who are fearful for their safety and are questioning Gencon’s silence over the assault. In fact, they are actively crushing ANY discussion on the manner.

They are specifically using 1984 style tactics on their Twitch channel. They first began giving users short bans if they brought up the assault, but then resorted to completely wiping their stream chat and limited it apparently to people who have been following for three months. Thanks to several Twitter users proof of the bans are clear. One user who was watching the GenCon live feed was told they were banned because “this isn’t the place to discuss this.”

While GenCon appears to be banning people and silencing those asking about the alleged assault against The Quartering, they have remained silent about his alleged assaulter despite their own Ethics & Conduct stating that “Violating any federal, state or local laws, facility rules or convention policies … constitute grounds for explusion from the convention without refund.”

In fact, their policy instructs people to “seek out Gen Con Event Staff or Gen Con Security to report the incident.”

Given they still have not released a statement regarding one of their one exhibitors being accused of assault one has to wonder if Gen Con’s silence means other attendees could be at risk. Are they protecting a client who has a booth over attendees?

Or could their silence be politically motivated? If you happen to think the wrong way, well then it appears Gencon won’t do its due diligence when it comes to any possible violence you might face.

It would appear that The Quartering’s mistake was to fail to identify as female. GenCon will leap in with guns blazing if a hapless dork stares at a female cosplayer for two seconds too long, but a violent attack on an attendee by an exhibitor goes unremarked. That’s not a viable strategy.

At DevGame, a Devstream on two different types of simulation, for process and for effect.

When you use simulation for process, you almost always have a situation where the results are not going to be realistic. The process is complicated and it is intrinsically inaccurate. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about an AI attempt to replicate human intelligence, whether you’re talking about an attempt to replicate an infantry firefight, or whether you’re dealing with something like a football or soccer game, in all of those cases you’re dealing with multiple layers of abstraction, and every abstraction, every assigned variable is going to be different than the real world

Even if you build a very complicated model using very accurate statistics, the small errors, the small differences, are going to multiply so that by the time that you get to the end result, you’re not going to end up with very realistic numbers.

Also on DevGame, a reader raises an interesting question about whether the transformation FPS games is related to r/K selection theory.

A number of people have been asking me to do the occasional Darkstream dedicated to games and game development, so I gave it a shot last night and it appears to have been reasonably well received. Because I anticipate considerably more discussion on this front in the coming months, and because a lot of the people interested in it will have no interest in the other subjects regularly addressed here, I’m not going to post Devstreams here, but on the DevGame blog instead.

The interesting thing to me about Fortnite, and the reason why I consider Fortnite to be essentially the game designers more or less giving up, is because what we have been doing as FPS designers from the very beginning is attempting to provide meaning and structure and story and experience to the action, and unfortunately we’ve been fighting the tendency of a certain group of players – who I am not at all convinced are the majority of players, but there are a lot of them – and they have a tendency to simply run around like chickens with their heads cut off. If you’ve played any online game starting back in the days of Doom and Heretic – yeah when we were playing with 4-player and 8-player networks – what you would see is some people would play strategically, some people would camp, other people would would team up and move cooperatively, but you always had the people who just run around like crazy, blasting away like crazy, and basically behaving in a way that you can’t even possibly consider anything that is remotely approaching anything credible or realistic.

And so, with Fortnite, and I have played it, and it’s a very good example of what it is the Battle Royale genre and so forth, but ultimately there is no purpose, there is no story, the action is the experience. Now that’s ok, that’s fine if that’s if that’s what you want, but you see, for years designers have been trying to hide that, they’ve been trying to keep that under control, and what Fortnite represents – and it’s obviously not the first Battle Royale game, it’s not the only one, but it is the most successful, the most symbolic of the concept – it’s basically the designers throwing up their hands and saying, “you know what, you guys just want to run around like chickens with your heads cut off slaughtering each other, here you go!” And to their credit, they give you the means to do that, so that’s what’s different between that and Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other FPS games. Almost all the other games were trying to limit that, they’re trying to limit it through the level designs they’re trying to limit it through the ammo drops, and all that sort of thing.

I can’t say more about this at the moment, but there is a very real possibility that we will soon be moving Alt-Hero into the game space as well as the movie space in the not-too-distant future. So, it’s best to be prepared for that.

Derek Smart was right all along:

YEAH, NO MORE REFUNDS. EVER.

I am just going to jump right into this one, no preamble, no foreplay, nothing. If you put money into Star Citizen, and you didn’t apply for or get a refund before end of 2017 – congrats you’re now a statistic in a long con scam. The End.

I saw this coming a mile away, over three years ago in 2015. And, like my other warnings, I issued a Red Alert about the implications. Some people listened, got a refund, and got out. Others were riding the wave of the project’s popularity due to repeated lies from Chris Roberts’ camp, and so just kept on giving them money. Hey, it’s their money – and we don’t care.

It’s now 2018, and all what I warned about has all come to pass. CIG has now gone on the record that, as I had accurately predicted, their TOS changes over the years were designed to rip backers off. Here are two official statements recently issued to Motherboard/Vice , Kotaku , Ars Technica , PC Gamer and others.

“Our Terms of Service provides refunds for 14 days after each pledge is made, but company policy is to refund anyone who has second thoughts for up to 30 days after their pledge, no questions asked,”
 – CIG

“The Terms of Service are not retroactive, but a huge majority of Mr. Lord’s pledges came after the TOS was changed to specify arbitration, and those pledges are under that TOS,” the rep wrote. “His pledges with new money on top of his earlier pledges required him to accept the new Terms of Service.” 
– CIG

Let me preface everything that comes next with these irrefutable FACTS:

1. Star Citizen was NEVER billed as an Early Access game. Not even once.
2. In Oct 2012 Chris Roberts asked for, and raised $2M via initial Kickstarter crowd-funding. He promised to release both multiplayer (Star Citizen) and single-player (Squadron 42) by Nov 2014.
3. By Aug 2013, when the first hangar module was released, they had raised $16.7M.
4. By Nov 2014, the month he promised it would release, after increasing the game’s scope significantly, they had raised $65M.
5. Contrary to what some backers try to promote, there was NEVER a vote of consensus to increase the scope of the game. That scope creep came when Chris Roberts himself created additional stretch goals after the initial Kickstarter goal was met. And then he kept on doing it by making various feature promises, new ship JPEG sales etc.

Right. So now lets discuss why this backer lawsuit and his subsequent court loss is so significant now more than ever. I have covered the fiasco in three Twitter threads since news of this backer’s lawsuit broke. But first, a bit of history for context.

Now, I’m not happy about this. Chris Roberts is one of my design heroes. Wing Commander, the Secret Missions, and Wing Commander II are some of the games I played most heavily throughout the entire course of my life. But I had my doubts early on too, so much so that I did not pursue a potential opportunity to work on the AI design for what were then the wingmen in a proposed Wing Commander reboot.

And, you will note, I did not back Star Citizen even though I very nearly did so on three separate occasions. The problem that I always had with the project was what set off Derek’s radar in the first place: I don’t see how he can actually build this thing. Because I’m pretty sure I couldn’t.

That’s the thing about game designers. We’re genuinely not jealous of those who have done better than we have. We admire the great ones. We try to learn from them, to understand them, to fully comprehend their designs. I get Akalabeth. I get Wing Commander. I get Doom. I get Fantasy General. I get Puzzle Quest. I get Fortnite, even though I despise everything for which it stands. But I still don’t get how Star Citizen was ever supposed to function.

Arkhaven is happy to announce that Alt-Hero #2: Rebel’s Cell is now available in print at the Arkhaven Direct bookstore for $2.99. This is the limited-run gold logo edition.

We are also pleased to announce that the gold logo edition of Alt-Hero #1: Crackdown has sold out and is no longer available. However, if you are a gold logo edition owner who would like to pick up a regular logo edition, they are now available at Arkhaven Direct.

It is possible that Amazon still has a few gold logo editions in stock, but the print run for the first issue gold logos has been shut down with just over 2,400 copies printed and sold.

In other Alt-Hero news, MAGNATE has provided an update on DevGame regarding the current state of the RPG development and the results of its most recent playtest. And here’s a random thought: how about an Alt-Hero replacement for the now-defunct City of Heroes? For reasons I can’t share now, that’s a LOT more potentially viable than you would probably imagine.

Our friends at Autarch are running a new Kickstarter campaign for an epic kilodungeon for the ACKS role-playing game system called The Secrets of the Nethercity. They do quality stuff. Full disclosure: I’m a backer.

For three thousand years, the secrets of the Nethercity have been hidden. Now the delving of man has breached the ruins, and the lore and treasures of the ancients wait in the darkness below for those bold enough to seize them. But an inhuman evil slumbers in that darkness, and the time of the Awakening is at hand….

We’re excited to announce Autarch’s eighth Kickstarter project: The Secrets of the Nethercity™, an immersive dungeon for the Adventurer Conqueror King System™ and other D20 fantasy role-playing games.

With Secrets of the Nethercity you get:

• An epic “kilodungeon” with 240 location entries spread across 20 different dungeon sub-regions that can be explored in a nonlinear fashion over the course of your campaign 
• 12 new monsters, including the chryselephantine statue, faewyrd, hydropian, and terror of death
• 30 new magic items, including the bag of faerie seeds, the funerary barge of the cults, horn of the eagles, scepter of sacred power, and shadowcowl robe
• 4 new character classes, including the elven cultist, hierophant, and warlord
• A special appendix providing step-by-step worksheets to adapt the Nethercity to your favorite campaign setting
• A home base (the city of Cyfaraun) for use by your adventurers in between dungeon delves. The city is presented in summary format in the adventure itself, and the city and the sewers below it are presented in more detail in a supplement called Capital of the Borderlands (available at $20 and above pledge level). With every bonus goal, we’ll expand the city and sewer levels!
• The Nethercity, the city, and the sewer level in between are all beautifully mapped by the incredible cartography of Dyson Logos and Simon Forster. You get maps of the city, sewers, and Nethercity, as well as zoomed-in sectional maps of each major area. With every bonus goal we hit, we’ll add more maps.

As great as that sounds, I am even more excited about rumors that Autarch’s next crowd-funding effort is going to be something on the wargaming front. The fantasy wargaming front.